this is a long ago written parody written for my son when he was 9. He is now 32 and I can't find the pages.. Please be patient.

listen child! I can tell you what I know. We lived once in a world of controlled madness. Everything was teeter totter. The population was over 4 billion people!

Food was abundant in some places, and in other places people sat on the bare rocks and sand with not a spark of hope in their eyes.

The people who had an abundance of food tried to help. Those privileged people watched their television screens for over seven hours every day, and at mealtimes an announcer would show them pictures of things that were happening on the planet each day. It was called the "news" and people would always sit down and watch the starving people at mealtimes.

Most of the countries that had plenty of food would store it up and store it up because they could never eat it all even though they tried very hard and got very fat trying. Eventually the piles were so high they called them "mountains" and "lakes". Mountains of butter, cheese, wheat. Lakes of wine, milk and beer.

It became so bad that their rulers offered to sell all the surplus to other nations for less money than it cost to produce, but no one really wanted it.

A lot of people said that all the extra food should be given away to the people who had nothing and sat on the hot bare sand without any spark of hope in their eyes. That sort of thing was frowned on by all the rulers because the people who sat on the hot bare sand and rocks did not believe in the same things as the people who ate their meals and watched their televisions. They called it "politics".

Sometimes millions of people would get together and pretend politics did not exist and they would send food in great boats and wheeled transport and aeroplanes. But when the food arrived the rulers of the people who sat on their sand and rocks would only feed themselves so they got to be like the others.

Nothing really worked very well because when it got down to the facts not even all the rulers of all the nations could work out how to make things work. Besides, they were all scared of each other, and because there were all scared of each other they spent more money on guns and tanks and missiles and bombs every year than they spent on feeding everyone on the whole planet.

It got to be so crazy that the people who sat on the hot bare sand and rocks without a spark of hope in their eyes quite often tried to eat the grease that made the guns work.

There were lots of guns and fat soldiers in those places. The soldiers were there to stop the people who sat on the hot bare sand and rocks from sitting on the hot bare sand and rocks. They made all those people walk and walk until they were all told to stop and sit down altogether so that when they died of starvation in front of the TV cameras it was easy to clean up all the bodies that looked just like fried stick insects. The rulers told the soldiers that it was easier to feed the people if they were all forced to keep together in a bundle, but there never seemed to be any food left over after the soldiers had had their lunch.

Oh child! it was a strange and dangerous world. You may think that now is dangerous, but then was double-dog dangerous. Triple-dog! Don't you never mind about that!

Someone once said that friends are people who know everything about you and still like you anyway. Well perhaps! Perhaps friends are people who know nothing about you and that's the reason they like you. The folks that know nothing about you and like you might stop liking you when they do begin to know you better. Then instead of being friends they turn into worst enemies... or even worse than that, if there is such a thing is worse than that.

The people who sat on the hot bare sand and rocks without a spark of hope in their eyes had no friends to speak of... not real friends anyway, although lots of politicians said encouraging things sometimes when it came around time for elections and stuff like that. The real truth was that their countries were not "strategic", and they had nothing that the rich that people could actually use. No oil, no gold, no crops, no trees, no beef or lamb, no technology, no science, just endless miles and miles of hot bare sand and rocks. Oh yes child, they had plenty plenty much of that! In hot bare sand and rocks they were rich.They certainly had more than anyone else in the whole wide world... but no one had ever worked out how to turn it into money.

Then, out of the blue one lazy day, a rich scruffy young Irish rock and roll star called Bob, rolled over and scratched his bum in bed, then he scratched his scruffy beard, and ran his fingers through his scruffy hair. He sat up and leaned on one elbow to talk to Paula who wasn't there because it was four o'clock in the afternoon and she was doing the laundry down at the laundromat. He scuttered around in the bedside cabinet looking for a cigarette because for a second or two he'd forgotten that he'd given up smoking. "Mondays!" He muttered to himself. "I don't like Mondays!" Then he pulled the sheet over his head fully intending on waiting until Tuesday before getting out of bed.

Bob couldn't sleep though. Songs and tunes kept rolling around in his head. Interlaced inside the songs and tunes was a funny feeling, a sort of BOTHER just cranking and clanking around in there.

Television was a sort of electronic box people put in their living rooms to keep themselves informed and entertained. The people who sat on the hot bare sand and rocks without a spark of hope in their eyes didn't have television. They didn't have electricity, or, in fact, anything at all. Not food, or water, or clothes, or medicine, or beds to sleep in. Some of the BOTHER though that was cranking and clanking around in there with his songs and tunes had to do with television, but he didn't know that, because that's what bother is. Nebulous, and that means indistinct, or formless. Clouded.

Television either told lies, or the truth, (it really depended on who you believed to be right or wrong). Not many people knew the difference between the two anyway. It's a difficult concept to understand that truth is only the truth of the majority if people believe it is... even if it is actually a lie, or a lot of lies put together. Lies are only lies if hardly anyone believes them even if they are actually the truth. Because truth is just such a difficult concept it was easy for the television viewers to not worry too much and just believe everything. Now, some folk might say that's a lie! Well, it might be mightn't it?

Television, it was said, brought 'the world into your living-room', and people with television, (BILLIONS) of people could watch all the other people in the whole world, (well, certain ones anyway) in a single hour of TV news. LIVE broadcasts too! They could see battered bodies from airline crashes, people rotting in leper colonies, crazies murdering hundreds of people in the streets, ALL the latest bombs and guns, whole wars, disasters, allsorts like that.

Bob decided to sit up and watch the telly for a while. The songs and tunes were getting too mixed up with the bother, and anyway it was nearly six o'clock. The news always started at six o'clock because that's when most folk got home from work and set down to dinner. It was gobble and goggle time at six o'clock.

When Paula got home a few minutes after six, she dumped the finished washing on the bed, mumbled something like "Oh good! The news is on", and snuggled into Bob smelly feet to watch.

"Why do you always say oh good the news is on?" Bob asked furrowing his scruffy brow. "Because that's what everyone says!" Paula answered snottily. She was of course right. In those days Paula was actually right most of the time. Even when she was wrong it sounded as if she should be right so people tended to believe her rather than Bob. In fact not many people ever believed Bob. Even when Bob started the rock group called the Boomtown Rats and told his mum and dad she was going to be a star, no one believed him. Bob however, did just that. But that's sort of beside the point

After the news finished the TV stations would show cop stories and western shoot-em-ups, and they had talk shows where superstars